“We need a new story to guide us”: Towards a curriculum of Rahma

Abstract

Beginning with a storied moment of encounter at an academic conference in which several scholars confidently asserted the need to “humanize those who have been dehumanized”, I engage in autobiographical narrative inquiry into my tensions with this seemingly “common sense” pedagogical belief and curricular approach. I do so by interweaving my stories of experiences as a teacher educator, intergenerational survivor of Palestinian displacement, mother to a dis/abled child, and Canadian Muslim woman in hijab who is all too familiar with a condescending pity of those who project their stories of me—of who they believe me to be and what they believe my experiences to be—upon me. I also draw upon the work and ideas of curriculum, feminist, and cultural scholars and theorists to illuminate how teaching for the humanization of Others can impose borders within and between relational selves in the making. I invite other teacher educators and teachers—including those from within familial curriculum-making worlds—to imagine how we might co-compose what I have come to understand as a curriculum of Rahma alongside children, youth, families, caregivers, colleagues, and others within and across the many places we co-compose curriculum.

Keywords:

• Curriculum
• humanizing
• Muslim
• teaching
• diversity
• inclusion
• equity

Acknowledgments

I want to honour and acknowledge the support of my friends and colleagues: Dr. Janice Huber, Dr. Dwayne Donald, Dr. Zahra Kasamali, Dr. Cathryn van Kessel, and Dr. Tommy Ender. Thank you for your wisdom, encouragement, and guidance in making this paper possible. I also want to thank the Editorial Team of Curriculum Inquiry for their support throughout this paper’s journey to publication. Being a CI Writing Fellow was a wonderful experience and I am grateful to you all.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I engage in autobiographical narrative inquiry by telling and retelling my stories of experiences, paying particular attention to temporality (the fluidity of time), sociality (the overlappings and relationships between personal and social), and place. I do so with reflexivity and intentionality, for as Clandinin and Connelly (2000) noted, “Our research interests come out of our own narratives of experience and shape our narrative inquiry plotlines” (p. 121).

2 Ahmed (2012) explained that diversity work is “a way of attending to what gets passed over as routine or an ordinary feature of institutional [and social] life is often imbued with tension and uncertainty” (p. 22).

3 Clandinin (2013) explained,

The terms – living, telling, retelling, and reliving – have particular meanings in narrative inquiry. We understand that people live out stories and tell stories of their living. Narrative inquirers come alongside participants … and begin to engage in narrative inquiry into our lived and told stories. We call this process of coming alongside participants and then inquiring into the lived and told stories retelling stories. Because we see that we are changed as we retell our lived and told stories, we may begin to relive [emphases added] our stories. (p. 34)

4 Huber et al. (2011) discussed curriculum as being composed in two worlds: school and familial curriculum-making worlds. They argued that while the school is recognized and accepted as a place where curriculum is composed, familial curriculum-making (the curriculum that is composed within familial and community places) is not often recognized as an equally important site of curriculum-making.

5 Donald (2019) clarified that this imaginary includes the promise of “unfettered economic growth and material prosperity” (p. 104).

6 It is beyond the scope of this paper to do justice to the decades of work that Sylvia Wynter has done to trouble and resist colonizing conceptions of what it means to be human. Instead, I foreground some of her key ideas and arguments to support this autobiographical narrative inquiry.

7 In her interview with David Scott (2000), Wynter discussed the transgressive work of Elsa Goveia and how “she could not have made these points on the basis of empirical data if she had not trained herself to be a proper historian, that is, in one of the disciplinary paradigms of that Word” (p. 159). She insisted that “there can be no utopian saltationism, whether in politics or in epistemologies, [because] discontinues can erupt only out of the seedbeds that have been empirically pre-prepared for them” (p. 159).

8 An Arabic word for grandmother.

9 Arabic for “May God have mercy on her.”

10 This is how my family refers to Palestine.

11 An Arabic word that is used to express gratitude. It means “All praise is for Allah (SWT).”

12 In using the term “intergenerational survivor,” I draw inspiration from Dr. Mary Young’s (2005) discussion of the “intergenerational narrative reverberations” in relation to first and subsequent generation survivors of Canada’s Residential Schools.

13 For Dewey (1938), educative learning is built upon the continuation of experience, in that “experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies it in some way” (p. 35). He cautioned, “Any experience is mis-educative that has the effect of arresting or distorting the growth of further experience” (p. 25).

14 See endnote iv.

15 Much has been written about how (teacher) educators might approach subject matter imbued with what Britzman (1998, 2013) termed “difficult knowledge” (for example, see: Britzman, 1998, 2013; Garrett, 2017; Gaudelli et al., 2012; Rodríguez & Salinas, 2019; van Kessel, 2019). In the field of education, difficult knowledge is often understood as “the teacher and student encounter with the painful and traumatic curriculum that represents history as the woeful disregard for the fragility of human life while seeking to create new meanings from the ravages of humanly induced suffering” (Britzman, 2013, p. 100).

16 The Indian Residential School system was created and funded by the Canadian government (and administered by different Christian churches) for more than 160 years with the express purpose of separating Indigenous children from their families, communities, traditions, identities, and cultures (Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015).

17 It is important to clarify that in this storied moment, the student and I were discussing the ongoing reverberations of Indian Residential Schools in Canada. I was attempting to make visible how, while neither of us were personally responsible for specific horrific and inhumane decisions/practices, we are implicated in different ways. However, throughout our time together, I repeatedly asserted that settler colonialism is an ongoing and very different form of violence that all settlers (including myself) benefit from, are implicated in, and have a responsibility to work against.

18 Donald (2019) beautifully elucidated that honouring our enmeshment with our more-than-human relatives entails an “acknowledgement of the sacred ecology that lives inside us. First and foremost, we acknowledge that the sun is literally the giver of life. We acknowledge that our bodies are comprised of sunlight-inspired energy that inhabits the air, water, minerals, plants, and animals that we consume. We acknowledge, too, that despite any current and future technological advances in how we live our lives, we will remain fully dependent on this sacred ecology to keep us alive” (p. 104).

19 Pseudonym for my youngest daughter’s name.

20 As a female Black US legal scholar, Crenshaw (1989) was troubled by the “tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis” (p. 139). Using contemporary court cases (at that time) as places of departure, she argued, “Black women are sometimes excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse because both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender” (p. 140). She further argued that attempting to address the unique experiences of Black women’s exclusion within the existing legal framework was insufficient because “the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism” (p. 140). Crenshaw stressed, however, that the theory of intersectionality is not identitarian nor additive. Rather, intersectionality is an acknowledgement and exploration of how different systems of oppression converge to marginalize in unique ways.

21 Rather than liberalistic notions of citizenship that prioritize the (individualistic) capacity to work towards capital, Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2016) argued for a transformative dis/citizenship via dis/ability studies, one that acknowledges and reckons with the “theoretical, practical and political work that takes place either side of the binary, a binary denoted by the presence of ‘/’ … [and] consider[s] how we value the human and what kinds of society are worth fighting for” (p. 3).

22 This story fragment is not intended as a way to end this manuscript with a smoothed-over happily-ever-after ending. Rather, it is meant to illuminate how engaging alongside each other in ways that create spaces for stories to be (re)told and (re)lived is vital to a human(e) curriculum. It offers a glimpse of the possible, without claiming a finite (happy) ending.

23 As a narrative inquirer, I use the term “relational” in a specific way that acknowledges that we all live in relation to other beings and all of creation (Huber, 2000; Young, 2005). We live in relation to, and in the midst of, myriad contextual, interconnected, and overlapping personal, social, intergenerational, cultural, temporal, geographic, historical, political, linguistic, familial, and institutional narratives (Clandinin, 2013).

24 Although Rudine Sims Bishop (1990) elucidated her conceptualization of mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors in relation to encounters with literature, I draw upon this conceptualization in my imagining of a human(e) curriculum whereby differences are honoured in relational ways. Sims Bishop beautifully explained:

Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection, we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. (p. 1)

25 Like Greene (1995) and Sarbin (2004), I view imagining as an action upon the world; that is, I understand imagining as storied, experiential, embodied, and enacted.